Ekvalis has included media literacy and media education as part of its integral strategic approaches. Our media education programs are based on innovative, learner centered and interactive approaches. The media programs in Ekvalis are led by professional workers in media education who are specialized to work with one of the most developed media literacy concepts (such as those in Finland), journalists, fact checkers, youth activists and youth media influencers.
Ekvalis has been working with the media as a way to increase the positive representation of marginalized communities and to directly include these communities in creating their own personal narratives that are often neglected or dismissed. Ekvalis has worked on a regional project in the Western Balkans including youth activists from North Macedonia, Serbia and the Republic of Kosovo on creating alternative media narratives. Through a non-formal training approach, Ekvalis trained these youth workers on how to map and analyze existing harmful narrative based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and to further transform them – by creating alternative narratives in forms of podcasts, memes and awareness raising campaigns.
We implemented several minority centered media awareness campaigns including: the portrayal of people with disabilities and mothers of people with disabilities (with a specific gender element in this topic), LGBTIQ+ awareness campaigns and media campaigns for bodily autonomy, democracy and freedom of assembly.
Through our media education programs – we equip our beneficiaries with necessary media skills that are crucial for building democratic and equal societies. Ekvalis worked with investigative journalists who trained young people on how to critically analyze media, work with sources, fact check news, learned the basics of mobile journalism (MO-JO) from which they have been trained on how to record, produce, edit and distributed MO-JO videos just with using their phones and report at some critical places and environments.
Ekvalis is a member of the Media Litearcy Network of Republic of North Macedonia. The Media Literacy Network is created in order to facilitate the communication and consultation between different entities in the country working on raising the level of media literacy of all citizens. It should contribute to more frequent cooperation between the relevant factors and for better and more sustainable results from the projects.